Jon Abbott’s Reviews > The King's Traitor > Status Update

You are reading a long book. You're have way through and the hero has just been thrown out of an airplane (surrounded by a army of thousands, dropped in a well - whatever) with absolutely no possibility of living through the pickle.
But ... given the genre the MC must survive.

How many times do I let an author use an impossible-to-escape-from death as a tension point before I gag and start skipping forward?